All about E-Insurance; store your policies in digital form in repositories

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An e-insurance account, as the name suggests, is an electronic insurance account. This account is used to keep all your insurance policies in the electronic or digital form. Does this include all your insurance policies? Yes, it does. That means that your life insurance, car insurance, home insurance and health insurance policies can be converted into digital form and stored in your e-insurance account.

It is actually mandatory to have an e-insurance account now. The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) has said that if individuals hold insurance policies of a certain ticket size, the policy has to be issued and stored in electronic form. For most of the insurance policies, if your single premium or annual premium exceeds Rs 10,000, it will have to be issued electronically and stored in an e-insurance account.

In case of motor insurance and overseas travel insurance, all policies will be issued electronically and personal accident policies will be issued in digital form if the premium exceeds Rs 5,000. Limits for the sum assured have also been specified for issuing these policies in digital form.

The following table gives the details regarding policies that have to be issued in digital form.

Policy

Sum Assured

Premium

Term plan

Rs 10 lakh

Rs 10,000

Motor insurance

All policies

All policies

Health Insurance

Rs 5 lakh

Rs 10,000

Life Insurance other than term plan

Rs 1 lakh

Rs 10,000

Overseas travel insurance

All policies

All policies

The e-insurance account can also make your life easy as it helps you store all your policies in a single place. When you have your insurance policy in the paper format you need to store it carefully and there are chances of misplacing the paper. You needn’t worry about this if they are stored in the digital format. The best part is that you can store insurance policies issued by different insurers in a single e-insurance account. Here’s how to open an e-insurance account.

Opening an e-insurance account

One individual is allowed to have only one e-insurance account. You can ask your insurer to open an account or you can get in touch with a repository like the CDSL Insurance Repository or CAMS Repository Services, to open the account. You should understand that your insurer will partner with any one of the repositories in India to open your e-insurance account.

These repositories are approved by the IRDAI to provide e-insurance services. The repositories include CAMS Repository Services Ltd, Central Insurance Repository of CDSL, Karvy Insurance Repository and NSDL Database Management. The services provided by these organisations for opening e-insurance account are done free of cost.

Want to convert your paper insurance to electronic form? The repositories will help you do that too without any charges.

You can open your account online. Here’s how to go about it.

Choose a repository and visit their website.

Find the e-insurance account opening form and download it.

If you are given the option to fill the form online, you can fill up the form before downloading it.

Check the Know Your Customer (KYC) documents that will be needed. Keep them ready as you will need to submit them along with the form. These documents might include a copy of your PAN card, Aadhaar card, passport, ration card and voter ID. You may also need a cancelled cheque.

This form needs to be submitted along with the documents to an approved entity. You can get the list of such entities from the repository’s website. You can also submit the form along with the KYC documents to your insurer.

The documents will go through a verification process where they will be compared to the originals. So, ensure that you have the original identity or address proof with you when you submit the form and the documents.

The e-insurance account is opened as soon as the verification is done.

Get your e-insurance account number and login id.

You will be provided with the steps you need to follow to set the password for your account.

Once you set the password, your e-insurance account will be ready for use.

You can start storing all your policies in your e-insurance account once you have set it up. You can use the same account for different policies.